While 9to5Mac saw the chip's speed drop as low as 550MHz, this seemed to do more with an as-yet-updated Geekbench app testing the chip (which also resulted in the 1GHz assumption). A Geekbench update seems to paint a different picture now. By all accounts it appears the chip can change "speeds," however, resulting in better battery life and dynamically tuning itself to the demand for CPU.

Between this and the human-powered layout found in the dissection of the A6, it's obvious Apple's decades of hardware expertise have all led to creating an amazing CPU for the iPhone 5.